Flipkart has been a favourite for the top engineering talent over the past three years. Even two years ago, students lined up for being hired by Flipkart because they expected humungous opportunity for growth.MUMBAI: Flipkart will stay off campuses in the upcoming placement season, and instead will focus on absorbing the students it has previously hired, a top executive said.

The decision of the ecommerce firm, one of the most high-profile campus recruiters in recent years, comes after a season when it faced flak for postponing the joining date for the batch it recruited. In May, ET reported that Indian Institutes of Technology would likely strip Flipkart of its Day One status in their campus placement programmes over this delay.

"We will not be going to campuses for hiring this year," said Nitin Seth, its chief administrative officer.

"We have 175 students from IITs interning with us who are graduating in 2017 and we will make PPO offers to some of them. That will be our direct intake for 2017," he said. "Also, we had deferred joining of about 250-odd students from IITs and IIMs who will join us in mid-December. The combination of these two will meet our campus need for 2017," Seth added.

Placement at the most-sought-after educational institutions in India, IITs and Indian Institutes of Management, are around the corner. Most of the IITs will start placement on December 1. Placement at top IIMs starts early next year.

Broadly over the last two years, Flipkart has been hiring 200-250 students together from IITs and IIMs each year.

"Last couple of years we have hired outstanding talent. We are now focusing on developing them into senior contributors and managerial roles. That is the reason we are taking a bit of a pause. We have the best talent pool in the country from the top institutes and we want to build that first," said Seth, adding that this was also the reason the company deferred the joining dates for the June batch.

"With hiring comes responsibility and we need to give experience to the existing batch before we take more fresh talent," he added.

Flipkart has been a favourite for the top engineering talent over the past three years. Even two years ago, students lined up for being hired by Flipkart because they expected humungous opportunity for growth.A clutch of other startups had also failed to meet their hiring commitments to IIMs and IITs.

Earlier reports suggested a decline in campus hiring by top ecommerce companies this year. Some of the IITs ET spoke to, including Madras and Kanpur, said they were still awaiting a response from the ecommerce giant on their invite to join the placement that starts in December. Flipkart’s clarification puts all speculation to rest.

IIT-Kharagpur said it did not reach out to Flipkart for hiring this year as the alumni who are with Flipkart have suggested that there is no need for fresh talent at the company at the moment. "We have a strong alumni base at Flipkart and we got to know that their hiring need is not favouring freshers this year," said Shovan Panigrahi, vice-president, Technology Students Gymkhana at IIT-Kharagpur.